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Both Andy and I used the word “embed” in the titles of our posts. Truth be told, this is a little exaggeration. Using a web browser control object navigating to a Tableau workbook stored on a server like Tableau Public is not really embedding the workbook. The main disadvantage of those approaches is the fact that you can interact with the Tableau dashboards, but you are not able to edit the workbook. Let’s assume you are receiving a question during your presentation which cannot be answered with your existing views and dashboards: You are not able to add another sheet and do some extra data analysis and new visualizations on the fly. In other words, you are losing one of Tableau’s greatest advantages: rapid fire data analysis and Business Intelligence.

Of course you can physically embed the Tableau workbook in your PowerPoint presentation as an object like you can do with any other file of any other application. However, there is one main pitfall: PowerPoint does not allow you to open an embedded object during the slide show. You always have to interrupt the presentation, go back to the normal view in PowerPoint and open the file from there. Honestly, this is not much better than simply opening the file from the Windows explorer and it is far from being a seamless experience for the audience of your presentation.

So, here is today’s challenge: embed a full packaged workbook into PowerPoint and provide a way to open it directly during the slide show.

Saturday, May 05, 2012

How to embed Tableau Visualizations in PowerPoint Presentations – an alternative without using an add-in

The way stories and insights are presented to the management is fundamentally changing. For a very long time management presentation were based on PowerPoint decks with embedded static images of the data visualizations.

Nowadays, requirements have gone up. Static data visualizations are not sufficient anymore. Especially during presentations based on data analysis, it is expected that the presenter is able to answer questions on the data live during the meeting.

Tableau Software meets exactly this requirement. The highly interactive dashboard features and the ability to build new views on the fly by dragging and dropping enables you to answer almost every possible question on the data live.

However, in most cases your dashboard or data visualization will not cover all topics of your presentation. So what to do? Switching back and forth between PowerPoint and Tableau during the presentation? Well, this is an option, but it is inconvenient for the presenter and not a seamless experience for the audience.

So, what we need is a way to embed the Tableau visualization directly into the PowerPoint presentation. This will not only guarantee a seamless interactive presentation but also provide the option to distribute the PowerPoint file to the audience including an interactive Tableau dashboard.

Earlier this week my Tableau blogging colleague Andy Kriebel published a great article on his blog VizWiz how to embed a Tableau dashboard into a PowerPoint presentation using the free LiveWeb Add-In: